


the misplaced half of our lives

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 4x01, 4x03, Episode Tag, F/M, First Kiss, Hugs, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 06:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9807413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Madi starts to understand why Silver trusts Flint.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to write some Madi POV fic to explore how she feels about Flint. Partly inspired by natlet's [beautiful Silver/Flint/Madi ficlet](http://natlet.tumblr.com/post/157178351678/but-hey-guys-how-about-john-silver-and-his).
> 
> Title from the poem 'Beach Day' by Bruce Cohen.

She doesn’t think anything of it at first. The house.

Her mind is a dark, whirling thing, like those spinning tops she used to play with as a child. She keeps thinking of John, the way he looked after she kissed him for the first time. She can think of nothing but that; she hardly knows where she is and doesn’t much care. But then Flint and Billy begin to argue, and her wits sharpen as she does her best to gain some semblance of control over the situation.

Flint’s gaze lingers on her for a moment, and then he marches away from them, out of the house.

Billy’s eyes flicker over her uncertainly, and he tells his men to give her her own room to rest for the night. She is the only woman here, and she supposes he wants to respect her privacy. She is shown to a room. There are fewer signs of the rebellion here, and it is only when she steps inside that room that she begins to think of this place as a house at all, and not simply a vessel of the war.

There’s a doll’s house in one corner. A shelf of books, and more books lying about the room, in stacks on the floor and on the table. A lady’s dressing box. A vase of withered flowers. She stares at all of it, barely able to comprehend what it is she’s seeing. It doesn’t make any sense to her in the context of the rest of the house, those rooms out at the front that she’s just come from, with the weapons and the maps, the black cups of liquor and the grey-faced men shuffling around in groups.

Whose house is this?

Almost as soon as the question rises in her mind, she shakes her head. She knows, instinctively, that that is not the correct question. The correct question is: whose house _was_ this?

It feels so familiar to her, this room. It makes her think of her own room at home. Her shelf of books. Her vanity. Her doll’s house. All of it assembled by her father’s love, over years and years. Piece by piece he had made her room what it was. On each shipment of supplies that came to her people from Nassau, there would be something just for her, from him. A necklace. A doll. A mirror. A sparkling perfume bottle of cut glass.

But most importantly: the books. She has an entire shelf of books now, but there was a time when she had no shelf. Just one book, and then another, and then another, and eventually as the months went past, her mother had a shelf made for her. And now it is overflowing. Some of those books carry his words in his neat, plain hand. Simple notes of love. _I miss you_ , some of them say. _I hope you will like this one_ , say others. Or: _Pray think of your dear father when you read this. He is thinking of you._

She blinks. Her eyes are wet with tears. When her father passed away, she spent the whole long night after the funeral just sitting in her room with a book in her lap, her fingers tracing the inscription: _Wishing you all the best on your birthday. I am proud of you._ All her life growing up, she devoured eagerly every book that was given to her, longing to sit with her father and talk about those books with him. She had to settle for writing down her thoughts in letters and reading his responses on paper. They never did get to discuss any of those books in person.

It is the memory of this grief, amplified by fresh grief, that draws her towards a book on the table. She opens it without thinking, and gasps when through her blurry vision she makes out two words in beautiful script on an otherwise blank page: _I’m sorry._

She is immediately sorry too; she feels like a girl, seeing her mother’s harsh frown as her mother scolds her for playing when she ought to have been studying. She snatches her hand back, the book cover falling shut, and wipes away her tears with her sleeve.

She cannot help another glance at the book, and this time she sees its title on the spine. _La Galatea_. She has not read this book before, but she thinks she has heard of it. Yes, her father told her of it in a letter. He gave her _Don Quixote_ , and she liked it very much, and he said that he knew the author had written another book, and he would try and get hold of a copy for her. He never managed to do so.

She sits down on the bed, every limb aching with sadness, and her gaze sweeps over everything around her once more. This room too, like her own, was put together with care, every piece of it brought here separately, lovingly, to make it what it is. Every piece of it holding infinite affection. She feels sure of that.

She thinks of Captain Flint earlier, crouching on the floor near the hearth and picking up a broken shard of china, something that was perhaps a teacup once. Turning it over in his hand. Nobody else would have paid that fragment any mind.

He had been the one to bring together all the pieces of this place then, once. For a woman. Madi has heard talk of a Mrs Barlow before. It is a name that passes on the lips of Flint’s crew occasionally, spoken of with a mixture of apprehension and awe, as one might speak of a god. She knows that Flint raged over this woman’s death, burnt Charles Town to the ground for her, went round slaughtering English magistrates for her.

She wonders what the captain was apologising to this woman for, and finds herself half smiling at this strange line of thought, even as more tears well in her eyes. She grasps a fistful of the bedclothes and winces. They have not been washed in a long time.

Something nudges the back of her mind. She’s thinking of John again, a night when she woke in the small hours to discover him out of bed, sitting at her desk, reading a book by candlelight, and she’d had to coax him back to bed. She hadn’t paid much heed to the book he’d been reading, too distracted as always by how good he looks naked in candlelight, his body gleaming and gilded like all these book titles, but now she remembers it was _Don Quixote_.

She jumps to her feet and searches the room for a copy, but it yields none. She is almost certain, then, that there would have been a copy of it on the _Walrus_ , in the captain’s cabin. Flint must have mentioned the book to John, and John read it because he is— _was_ always hungry for anything to do with his captain. A pity, though, that she can never confirm this for herself. It would be at the bottom of the bay now, along with all the rest of the captain’s books. Along with…

She chokes on that thought, gripping the edge of the dressing table. Her chest heaves with sobs for some minutes. After a while, she decides she cannot take much more of this room at this moment. She walks out, and keeps walking until she is outside, in the night air.

Captain Flint is just standing there on the verandah, his arm around a post, as solid as if he were a tree that had forever entwined its branches with this house. Was it only this morning that she told John that she understood why he trusted Flint? She’d said that, but she hadn’t really understood. She began to understand, when she and Flint were standing on the beach together, waiting and watching each longboat that came in. Sharing that tense, fraught hour with the captain, she _saw_ that he cared as deeply as she did. They stood as two mountains on that shore, and only John Silver would have moved them.

She looks at him now and she sees the words _I’m sorry_ written in that ornate script, and she thinks she finally does understand fully why John trusted him. Why John loved him.

“I don’t think he is dead,” Flint says, abruptly. Madi quirks her head, taken aback, and does not know what to say. “You must think I’m just… deluding myself. Delaying the inevitable, warming myself with false hopes though it will only mean that the cold will hit me harder when it finally sets in. But I truly do not think he is dead. I… I _feel_ it. That he must be alive, still, somewhere. He would never allow himself to die that easily. He’d fight it every fucking step. Not like me.” He huffs a bitter, odd laugh, and turns to face Madi. “He fights my own death for me. Do you understand? If he can fight mine so well, he can damn well fight his own.”

Madi takes the time to consider this, the quiet ferocity in Flint’s eyes burning in the light from the house. She says, “I truly believed that my father would make it. The longer he stayed alive, the more convinced I was that he would be able to pull through. Even though the healers told me there was little hope, I still believed. My belief did not make any difference. My sorrow pierced me more, in the end.”

Flint shakes his head. “It’s not belief,” he says. “You know that he and I have spoken of it, how those people I become associated with always meet their end because of me. I have always been afraid that he would suffer the same fate. But right now… He’s out there. I know it.” 

It hurts her, how fervent he looks, almost as if he could _will_ John to come back by the strength of his passion. He looks like he would fall to his knees and kiss John’s feet if John emerged from the shadows right now. Tears prick at her eyes again, and _damn_ it, how does she have such an endless reserve of tears? Surely she should have used up all the oceans of the world by now, and yet here she is, weeping again at the sight of Flint’s ardent eyes.

On the longboat to the beach after the _Walrus_ was wrecked, she had cried while Flint simply shifted awkwardly, hands clenching into fists and unclenching again. Now, Flint again looks like he has no idea what to do with his hands. She cannot bear it.

She reaches out and takes one of his hands, holding it in hers as the tears run down her face. She pulls him towards her, and wraps her arms around his waist. She can only think of how she had embraced John just like this when her father died, and it makes her breath stutter in helpless, desperate gulps.

Flint is broader, taller. Warmer, somehow, as if heated by the fervour of his emotions. He puts his arms around her shoulder, gently, lightly.

Eventually, she lets go. She scrubs her face with her sleeve, losing count of how many times she has done that today. She turns, partly, towards the house. “Will you come in and rest?”

“I can’t go back in there,” Flint says, his voice rough. He is not crying, but he seems close to it, the closest he has been to it all day. “I… I can’t.” He turns away, to look out into the overgrown plot of land by the house once more.

She thinks of that room with all the books. She doesn’t think she can go back in there either. Not yet. She takes a few steps towards Flint, joins him at the railing of the verandah, her shoulder just pressed against his.

“Do you mind?” she asks.

“No,” he says, and so she stays a while.

* * *

What a day it has been. When she quoted _Don Quixote_ to Captain Flint and saw the way he reacted, she could not help but smile widely, and in that moment she saw that even if John was dead, there would come a day when she would be all right again, if she survived this war. That day still seemed far off, like a ship that was only a dot even through a spyglass, but she could _see_ it, distant though it was.

And then John wasn’t dead, after all.

When she told Flint, she saw the way his whole body suddenly seemed illuminated from within: everything about him glowed that much brighter under the midday sun. He set off to find John with eyes that were green as the dense, trap-laden forest around her home, promising death to anyone who would try and get to John through him, and she knew he would bring him back.

And he did. He brought John back, and John was in her arms, kissing her. She had never felt such joy in her entire life.

And then they even took Nassau back.

They are walking together now, all three of them, through the Governor’s house, lighting lanterns as they go. They find a study, a sparse bookcase. Rogers has not had much free time to gather reading material for himself, it seems.

“Madi quoted _Don Quixote_ to me,” Flint says to John, as if reminded of it by the bookcase.

John raises his eyebrows, and Madi’s heart leaps as it does to see every little expression flitting across John’s face now, thrilled by the pure euphoria of the fact that John is _alive_ and here in front of her. “You two seem to have grown very close since I was gone,” he says. “You’d barely talk to each other before. I’ve only been gone two days, and you two are already quoting literature to each other?”

“Madi stood by my side and rallied our men when Billy wanted to kill me,” Flint says.

Madi looks at Flint. “And you stood by my side when we realised that the plantation owners had put in a safeguard to make sure that none of their slaves would revolt.”

John is grinning, and Madi wants to kiss him again. “If I’d known that all it would take for you two to actually talk to each other was for me to disappear for two days, I would have done that a lot sooner.”

“Let’s get back to _Don Quixote_ for a minute,” Flint says.

John smiles. It is a smile meant to reassure, a soft smile, creasing the edges of his eyes; it is not even directed at her, and her whole body feels light and warm as a puff of smoke. “It’s one of your favourites, isn’t it, Madi? I found it on Madi’s shelf and I started to read it the other night after you mentioned that you liked it too, Captain.”

Flint seems to relax a little, a hint of a smile on his lips echoing John’s.

There’s more here, Madi knows, than they are willing to divulge in front of her. She only has a glimpse of it, just as she is aware that “a lot has changed” since John confessed that he was concerned about never resurfacing from the depths to which he had to descend in order to connect with his captain, but she doesn’t know _what_ , exactly, has changed. Only that something happened which made John trust Flint more, and subscribe to the war much more wholeheartedly than he did before. 

Flint has many secrets, and she knows that John alone of all men on earth is allowed to be privy to them. It used to rankle her, this closeness between John and his captain, because she could only see how dangerous Flint was. Now, she thinks, she understands that danger. It has a purpose, like a wielded blade, and she sees that its purpose is to protect John, not to harm him. She’d said that if she were a no-good pirate, she would follow John anywhere. Well. Flint _is_ a no-good pirate, and maybe he would do the same, too.

They carry on talking about the book, all three of them, as they amble through a doorway that leads to a bedroom. The Governor’s bedroom. And then John practically pounces onto the bed, stretching out his limbs. “A _bed_!” he exclaims. “A goddamned bed. I have been thinking about how I’d kill a man for a bed.”

“You killed plenty of men for this bed,” Flint says, wryly.

Madi chuckles, and she sits down on the bed next to John, laying a hand on his belly. He looks up at her with such love, her heart brims with it in response. She bends down to kiss him, but then she hears the sound of Flint taking steps away from them. John hears it too; she feels him pushing against her, raising his head.

She puts a steadying hand on John’s chest, and turns around. “Captain,” she calls.

“I thought it best to leave you two to it,” Flint says, already in the doorway, head half-turned to the side, not quite looking at her, at them.

She glances at John, sees the way his eyes are anxiously focused on Flint. She perceives no difference in the way he looks at his captain, and the way he looks at her. 

“You know, Captain, even if you left the room, you would still be present in our bed,” she says.

At this, Flint turns to face her fully, surprise lifting his brow.

She continues, “John is always speaking of you. Always. Perhaps if you stayed, I would not have to put up with him blathering about you yet again.” She gives John a fond, teasing look, and he elbows her.

“This is complete slander,” John starts to protest, but Flint’s face is so devastatingly beautiful in this moment, eyes wide and lit with hope, that even John forgets to speak.

Flint takes a hesitant step back towards the bed. Madi extends her arm and offers him her hand, and he takes it. She squeezes it encouragingly and he comes up to the bed. John sits up, and then he has a fist in his captain’s shirt, and even then they do not kiss just yet, just staring at each other like two blazing stars which hang side by side in the night sky but would never meet.

But then they do. They do.

She watches as they collide, Flint’s hand slipping out of hers and tangling into John’s hair instead as he climbs onto the bed, straddling Silver’s lap, and she has to blink away tears. She is as happy as she was when she kissed John the first time. She thinks of last night, that room with all the books, all the pieces of Flint’s love, amassed over time, and she realises that she wants to witness it happening anew. To see him build a house of love for John and fill it with carefully curated clutter, each thing a splinter of his own soul.

For her, too, if he would be willing.

She hears her beloved John gasp into the kiss, hears him and Flint both laughing from the sheer delight of finally getting to touch each other like this, their foreheads pressed together.

She leans towards Flint and murmurs in his ear, but not too quietly so that John can still hear her, “You never quit his mind. He carries you with him no matter what he is doing or where he is.”

“I carry both of you,” John says, fiercely.

“I don’t doubt that,” Madi says, smiling.

Flint is looking at John with so much wonder. “I carry you too,” he says, brushing his knuckles against John’s cheek, John’s lips. “I carry you too.” 

They lie down on the bed, all three of them, Madi and Flint’s hands linked over John’s hip as Flint kisses his mouth and Madi kisses the nape of his neck. A slave queen and two pirate kings, in the Governor’s bed. Madi closes her eyes, and thinks about that house of love. She will help to build it, too.

They will build it together, she and Flint, for John.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are much appreciated! <3 You can find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com) where I am being more and more consumed by OT3 feels.


End file.
